Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The Whiteboarding of History, starring John McCain and CBS

Does Katie Couric deserve to be fired because McCain's real (erroneous) answer as to the timeline of the Anbar Awakening got left on the editing room floor and substituted for another answer that let him look a little less foolish?

Perhaps, perhaps not. Couric, after all, asked McCain a proper question and gave him a chance to answer it in his own words. I have no way of knowing what latitude is within Couric's considerable pay grade and if she has the juice to stand over an editor's shoulder and say, "Cut that."

Couric's only a symptom of the problem with the news media and its cyclical handjobbing of clueless Republican presidential contenders. This is essentially the same media that helped Karl Rove destroy McCain's campaign during the South Carolina primary in 2000. And now, eight years older but hardly eight years wiser, McCain is benefiting from the same media that insist on making this a solid two horse race because it's better for ratings.

Or maybe there's a more sinister motive at work here, something more selfish and sinister than ratings and the promise of future access. Something that is all but obviously delineated in a marked difference between the way the media treat McCain and Barack Obama.

The real problem, as I see it from the standpoint of a news consumer as well as a political/social/media blogger, is an inability to understanding the true meaning of fairness and balance.

The media think fairness and balance means making two candidates look as if they're on an even footing no matter the difference in qualifications for an important job such as the American presidency. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's transparent, such as the height and intellectual difference between the two candidates in the last general election.

But fairness and balance doesn't mean making two candidates look equally qualified for a high office even to the point of airbrushing from a nationally televised news broadcast an idiotic and misinformed answer. CBS did, indeed, provide on its website a video showing McCain's real answer to Couric as well as a transcript. But you can't tell me the transcript and video were seen by as many eyes as Couric's Orwellian broadcast.

Fairness and balance means letting people do their own speaking on their own behalf, in their own words, and letting people like me form our own conclusions. The MSM have been giving McCain one pass after another when he makes one moronic comment after another.

Such as when he insists that Ahmadinejad is the real leader of Iran and that Barack Obama had pledged to negotiate with President Ahmadinejad.

I literally haven't the time to discover and source every one of the many, many senior moments that McCain has had just since last year. There simply are too many. Unfortunately, our mainstream media feel the same way since none of the above gaffes have been seized on for what they are: Troubling examples of how frighteningly unmoored from reality John McCain is.

If Katie Couric gets shitcanned from CBS by January next year as people are speculating, I wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over it. But firing Couric is not going to change the way the media report, or not report, the news any more than right wing bloggers helping to dump Dan Rather put us in a better-informed position than we're in now.

2 Comments:

It's not just Couric working in a vacuum. There's a load of writers and producers and editors working for CBS, too, that are all involved in making McCain look as good as he can.

What I want to know is the names of the people above the crew that are ordering them to ignore every standard of journalism, who are the ones that are intentionally making CBS (and the rest) into one-sided propaganda outlets?

I am amazed at how they aren't even hiding their right-wing bias anymore. The American people are so dumbed down that any right-winger can get on the air and recite blatant, obvious lies and the 'news' staff don't call them on it. And yet, when a left-of-Mussolini 'democrat' gets on the air and actually dares to point out some Reality, or Truth, the 'news' staff jump all over them.

Sigh! I wonder what ever happened to independent network news operations? I seem to recall we had such as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Howard K. Smith, Harry Reasoner. These were actual newsmen. Cronkite actually flew with bomber crews in WWII on actual missions. Murrow broadcast from London during the Blitz.

Nowadays, we have prettily coiffed newsreaders, male and female, who have no editorial independence whatsoever. They are good at reading whatever crawls across the teleprompter without a single thought. As Don Henley said so well:

"We got the bubbleheaded bleach-blonde, comes on at 5She can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye,It's interesting when people die, give us dirty laundry!"